Storm-thoughts and ice-songs: A creative-critical response to Old English eco-poetry

Abstract

This article looks at how ecocritical readings of The Wanderer, The Wife’s Lament, and Exeter Book riddles can inspire an ‘ecocreative’ way of rewriting and reimagining Old English verse. My creative-critical response shows how the self is shaped by environments in these poems; demonstrates that nature can reshape the roles allotted to men and women within society; presents poetic speech as both a human and nonhuman phenomenon; and situates the personal human loss of the elegies within the inhuman temporal perspectives of the riddles. I put these critical interpretations into creative practice by translating the speeches of the wanderer, wife, wind, water, and ice into one another and creating a more ‘ecological’ lyric voice that is at once human and more-than-human. My new creative-critical approach plays across the generic, gendered, and ontological boundaries set in place by previous scholarly, editorial, and translational practices. In the process, I remake these Old English texts as contemporary, polyphonic ecopoems.